


the last and worst thing

by thekasems



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Angst, Character Turned Into a Ghost, Depression, Jealousy, M/M, The Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-29
Updated: 2019-09-29
Packaged: 2020-11-07 14:30:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20818844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thekasems/pseuds/thekasems
Summary: I’m in your house, asshole. You don’t know it; you can’t see me, you can’t hear me. But I’m here. I can see you. I can hear you. And I’m gonna haunt the shit out of you.





	the last and worst thing

* * *

You left Derry; I felt that. The further away you got from it, the more I started to feel: changes in pressure, in altitude—so you flew out. Changes in temperature—so this is Los Angeles. I can see why you chose it over my city.

I was still nebulous, mostly unconscious, waiting. For what, I couldn’t tell.

Then you stepped through the door into your home, and in an instant I spread through it, like a ripple.

I’m in your house, asshole. You don’t know it; you can’t see me, you can’t hear me. But I’m here. I can see you. I can hear you. And I’m gonna haunt the shit out of you.

* * *

You clearly decorated this place yourself. It looks like a dorm room, not the home of a forty-year-old man who owns the place and has more than enough money to not shop at IKEA.

I try to tell you. I try to roll my eyes when you flick the lightswitch and on comes the leg lamp from A Christmas Story. I try to say hey asshole, you’re a grown man, why don’t you get an actual plate and some silverware when you grab a plastic fork to eat some Chinese food straight out of a carton that's been in your fridge for god knows how long.

A few hours later you run to the bathroom and throw up, and I try to tell you how all kinds of bacteria can still flourish in the fridge and how you probably ordered it from some cheap shitty place with a big fat “C” in the window and how you did it to yourself. 

You pick yourself up and stand on shaky legs, and I try to brush away the hair that got stuck to your forehead with sweat. But I am only the dim light beaming down as you wash your mouth out at the sink, and then the darkness that floods the room when you flick the switch and head off to bed.

* * *

Two full days pass before you get in the shower. I don’t know how you can stand it; I showered twice a day, every day from the time I started puberty until I died.

But you've been sleeping, mostly, which is okay; you just went through more in a week than most people go through in their lifetime. After two days you finally pull back the shower curtain at one in the afternoon and turn on the water, and while you wait for it to heat up, you peel off the clothes that you've been wearing since Derry.

I feel dirty watching you. I try not to; I try to be the dust bunnies hiding under your couch, or the creaking of the floorboard in your bedroom. But I don't get to choose what I am, so instead I am the steam rising from the scalding hot water, curling around your body as step into it, drifting over your legs and across your chest, clouding up the whole bathroom, fogging the mirror, so that no one else can see you, not even you.

* * *

I never believed in life after death. If I had, maybe I wouldn’t have been so fucking scared all the time. Sickness, hurt—what do those matter if you know you're gonna come out the other side? What did any of it matter?

You ask that same question to Bev on the phone. You slouch in your chair at the kitchen table—alone, you think—and cry, _ what was the fucking point. _

The fucking point was that we killed it. The fucking point is that there are kids in Derry right now who are alive who wouldn’t be if we hadn’t stopped it. The point is somebody else got a happy ending, and who are we to think that it should have been us.

I yell those words at you as loud as I can, bang on the table, hard. You should’ve noticed. I should’ve been shaking the goddamn walls. But all I see is one little ripple in the glass of whiskey you're holding, and it's only your hand that's shaking. 

* * *

You're writing again, which is good, I guess. Your stand-up always sucked, but now I know why: because it wasn’t you.

You write in a notebook, not on your laptop, which is… cute. Your handwriting is terrible, and I can only make out every third word, and every third word seems to be some conjugation of the word “fuck,” but I bet it’s funny. I hope it’s you.

When you get up to stretch your legs and burn some toast, I try desperately to pick up the pen and scratch out a message: Richie help I’m trapped in limbo and need you to perform a seance or an exorcism or something anything help me help me.

I get as far as “R” before the pen falls down and I can’t pick it back up. You return to the couch with no toast, scowling, and look back at what you’ve written, and you puzzle briefly over what it was you were starting to say with “R,” but then just scribble it out. 

* * *

Los Angeles is warm, not only because of the sun that beats down on it every day, but because of the energy of the millions of people in the city—loud, bright, crazy people, who burn way hotter than people in New York. You can't feel it, but the energy rolls over your house in waves. 

All this radiation should burn your place to a crisp. But whenever I’m around, and I’m always around, you have to wrap yourself in big stupid jackets to keep warm. You fiddle with the A.C. at first, thinking it must be broken, but eventually you give up and just pile extra blankets on your bed and your couch and try to bury yourself in them. 

The thickest pair of wool socks you own were balled up in the corner of your closet, hidden behind the two suitcases you brought home with you from Derry—the ones you refuse to unpack or even look at. While you were out yesterday, meeting with your publicist to give her some bullshit explanation of just what the fuck you thought you were doing when you walked off that stage in Chicago after just five minutes and then disappeared for two fucking weeks, I spent four hours carefully unrolling them, slipping them out underneath the closet door, and then laying them crookedly so that they peek out from beneath your bed: noticeable, but not suspicious.

_ Oh fuck, here they are_, you grumble the next morning. You’re welcome, asshole. 

* * *

You drink a lot. You drink too much. This morning you reached blindly for your bedside table the minute you woke up, feeling around for the bottle of bourbon you’d left on it the night before, the one I spent two hours moving to the kitchen counter after you fell asleep. If you want it, you’re going to have to get out of bed at least.

Forty minutes later, you do—get up and stagger into the kitchen, grab the bottle and take a swig from it like a milk carton. I tip it just enough so that you spill some down the front of your shirt. Maybe now you’ll take a shower.

* * *

Your agent came home with you tonight. Jason.

The minute you pulled up in the driveway I knew exactly what was about to happen. The vibrations in the air, or the psychic energy, or the smell of pheromones, or some shit—I don’t know. But when you turned the key in the lock I knew and I wanted nothing more than to really be dead, to be rotting in the dirt under the old Neibolt house where I belonged.

He's on you as soon as you close the door and you're kissing him back and I am the light leaking in between the half-drawn blinds of the front window. His hands are firm and almost rough and yours are shaking again and I am the shadow thrown on the ground when he turns on the lights and then the other darkness, undefined, when you turn them off again.

The two of you move through our house: first to the couch, only briefly, then through the hallway and up the stairs and why did I get trapped in _ your _ fucking house of all places for all eternity I don’t even _like_ you I _always_ hated you I _fucking hate you_ into the bedroom and onto your bed.

The way he grabs at you, the way you grab at him, too—I hate all of it. I want to burn the house down, but instead I make the whole room ice cold, starting with the pillow he lays your head on. The hairs on your arms stand on end and then you shiver, and I prefer to think it was because of me.

_ I know there’s a heat wave but Christ, Rich, could you jack the A.C. up any higher? _ Jason laughs as he undoes your belt, your button, your fly.

_ Fuck off_, you tell him, but there’s no real bite to it, no verve. You just say it and then close your eyes. What a fucking luxury.

* * *

Jason smokes, apparently, and tries to light a cigarette after he’s done with you, but I keep blowing out the flame. What kind of asshole smokes around somebody who’s quit?

He gives up and mutters something about cheap piece-of-shit lighters, but you’ve already turned your back, curled in on yourself, and you don’t respond. He looks at you and sighs and touches your back, _ You know, Rich, I _

try to focus, try to be the foundation buried deep in the ground beneath you, or even the shrill chiming of the ridiculous cuckoo clock in your living room as it strikes eleven, any sound that can drown out his voice, any place other than your bedroom.

_ Rich, I know something went down _

here, we all float down here. That was one hell. This is another.

_ went down and you’re pretty fucked up about it, but you can talk to me. _

You? He can talk to _ you?_ Who the fuck are _ you?!_, I try to scream at this terrible quiet moment I am being forced to witness.

You are quiet. You don’t shift into his touch, or away from it. He decides you’re asleep, is too stupid or doesn’t give enough of a shit to know better.

I know better. I have felt the ghost of your breath every minute of every day for months, and I know the difference between asleep-breath and trying-to-fall-asleep-breath, trying-not-to-cry-breath and trying-not-to-puke-breath, about-to-call-mom-breath and about-to-call-Bev-breath, good-dream-breath and bad-dream-breath and wet-dream-breath, coffee-too-hot-breath and coffee-too-cold-breath and jesus-this-house-is-so-fucking-cold-breath, which I know is my fault, I’m sorry, I'm sorry.

* * *

I consider smothering Jason in his sleep. I bet I could do it. I’m getting good at this stuff. 

Instead, I let him sleep in your bed, and then wake up in your bed, and then use your toilet and your sink, and then put on his pants and shirt and shoes and leave you—fucking leave you—before you even wake up.

When it’s almost noon and you do wake up and realize he’s gone, and you think you’re alone, you cry a little bit. Not much. Not like he means something to you. More like he doesn’t.

* * *

You take your chicken-scratch notes that are scribbled and doodled and stained all over and finally start to type them up on your laptop, and now I can read what you’ve been writing.

It’s funny. It’s sad. It’s you. It’s really sad, honey. When you get up for some coffee, I hit the backspace button on all the lines I don’t like, the ones about how you’re ugly and how you push people away by acting like a clown and how you did it, all of it, to yourself.

You come back and reread what you’ve got so far, and frown when you realize you must have accidentally skipped some lines when you were typing up your notes. You look back and forth between your laptop and your notebook, and then you scratch those lines out with your pen and I am the fragrant steam rising up from your mug, I am the gentle breeze through the window you’ve cracked open for the first time in months, I am relief. 

* * *

I rearranged your drawers, put the clothes you actually look nice in at the top and put the novelty t-shirts that say things like “Obama Can’t Ban ￩ THESE ￫ Guns” at the bottom.

My plan works, and you look borderline-presentable for about a week and a half. But on the day you’re supposed to meet with your publicist to talk about what you’ve been working on, you dig around in your drawers and fuck up all my hard work specifically to find the t-shirt with a picture of a man with a metal detector that reads “Beach Better Have My Money!” And you laugh quietly at your own shirt, because you’re a fucking idiot.

* * *

You’re getting better. Slowly but surely. You shower as soon as you wake up. You wait till after four to start drinking. You write in your notebook and then you transfer it to your laptop and I delete the worst of it and you only rewrite it sometimes.

You haven’t gotten sick in over two months. That’s good. You call Ben and Bev about once every two weeks and you cry, but you also talk more than you used to on those calls, and that’s great.

One night, you dress yourself up, put some product in your hair and go out, and a few hours later you return with a brunet man who has to stand on his tiptoes to kiss you.

It’s not like it was with your agent. You smile at him. You keep the lights on. You have a nice time, and I am the soft sighs you let out, and I am happy for you. I really am. After a lifetime of repression and sadness and shame, you deserve this nice man, who doesn’t smoke and who brings coffee to your bed when you wake up in the morning and who smacks your ass to make you smile when he’s on his way out.

I still raise the corner of the rug to trip him as he’s leaving, and that makes you laugh louder than I’ve heard you do in months. It’s stupid. You don’t know it, but it’s us.

* * *

* * *

I know something is different as soon as you wake up this morning. Your breath is different. It had never felt like this before. Somewhere between about-to-call-mom-breath and about-to-fire-Jason-breath. Nervous, but also determined.

You make breakfast, sit at the kitchen table and eat it like a human being. You read the New York Times on your phone, as if you were a citizen of the world, as if there were something in it to interest you. You stand up, wash your dishes, put them away calmly, all with that different-breath. You go back upstairs and dress in the clothes you don’t know I had picked for you, the pants that hug your legs just right, the shirt that brings out your eyes. You go in the bathroom and actually shave, and you only nick yourself once—just a little bit on the left cheek. And then you go into the closet and take out my suitcases and unzip them.

The feeling rips through me. Worse than death. Worse than It. You pry open my neatly-folded ribs, plunge your hands into my soft cotton guts. I scream and scream and scream. I am not the dust unsettled by a gust of air through the front door. I am no longer the loosening of a single thread against your skin. Suddenly I'm a thing you could dig through and hurt.

It doesn't matter that you're gentle. It doesn’t matter that you take care with each item of my clothing, holding them up and letting them fall open on their own before touching them to your clean-shaven face. It doesn’t matter. It hurts like hell, every time.

This is it, I sob: this is the destruction of my soul, finally, and this horrible consciousness I’ve had to endure will be scattered to the fucking wind, finally, and you can move on and have a happy ending, a happy life, and I can be dead, finally.

* * *

That night, after we left the Chinese restaurant, after we pulled up to the townhouse and you kept saying _ let’s go, let’s go _ like there was no reason to think we wouldn’t be leaving together, after I saw you for the first time in twenty-seven fucking years and god it felt like it had only been twenty-seven minutes, like nothing from all that time had been real, like the only thing that had ever _really_ been real had been _you_; _ that _ night, I unzipped my suitcase and quietly removed the ring from my finger and hid it at the bottom.

I don’t know why I’m doing this, I thought to myself as I did it. But I knew well enough.

* * *

You pick up the ring and hold it gently between your fingers, turning it this way and that, somehow finding something to admire in my tiny, hardened heart.

This is the last of it, I think. The last and worst thing for you to see.

I love you. I always loved you. I never stopped.

Goodbye, Richie.

You slide the ring onto your finger and oh.

“Richie?”

The sound of my whisper is so loud. How could I have thought that I had been screaming at you, all that time?

You jump out of your skin, shriek, and scramble to your feet all at once. You’ve flattened yourself against your closet door and your chest is heaving and you are staring right at me, as if you can see me. Can you see me?

“Richie?” There’s that voice again. Even louder this time, earth-shattering.

“_Eddie__?!_”

I look down. I am standing on the wood floor of your bedroom, right on top of the floorboard that creaks. I test it. It creaks under my feet. I have feet.

I look up. You are still cowering, panicking. I don’t blame you. I’m starting to panic, too. There’s blood in my veins—too much; air in my lungs—not enough.

“Nonono,” you’re saying. “No! We fucking _killed_ you! You’re supposed to be _dead!_” Tell me about it. “You—oh, fuck.” You’re covering your face with your hands now. They’re shaking violently. “I’m insane. Oh, fuck. This isn’t real. This isn’t real. We killed It. It’s not real.”

“Richie…” Need to remember how to say anything else. Mouth isn’t quite working yet. I try to step forward and my foot immediately catches on something, I don’t know what, I don’t have that spirit-awareness anymore, I am clumsy, I am human. I forget to put my hands out and fall flat on my face, feel my teeth crack together painfully and bite the inside of my cheek. “Fuck!” Blood in my mouth.

I roll onto my side and bring a hand up to my face, and it hurts. I can see you up there; you peek out from behind your hands and see me on the ground in my agony and shame.

You bark out a laugh. You fucking _ laugh _ at me.

“Eddie?” The smile is wiped from your face again. You slowly, warily remove yourself from the closet door and step closer.

“Yeah, it’s me, jackass. Can you help me out before I die again?” The words come out sloppy and garbled, but give me a break. I haven't had a mouth in almost a year, and I just bit the shit out of it.

“You’re—what the—oh, holy—”

Your hand pushes my shoulder, testing it, like a kid would poke at a dead bird with a stick.

“Can you fucking—”

pull me up and then I’m crushed against your chest, one of your hands in my hair, the other trying to cut my body in half. 

“Eddie— eddie— eddie—” you chant between sobbing-breaths. “You’re alive.”

“Can’t breathe!”

You release me and I crumple to the ground again, and then _you’re_ hovering over _me_ this time, on the wood floor of your bedroom, and one of us is on the floorboard that creaks.

“Eddie,” you whisper against my mouth, and this is brand new breath, and I am the warm and solid body underneath your fingertips, and you are pressing down against me, and I am with you, I was always with you, I never left.

* * *

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading!!! if you enjoyed this story, please consider making a small donation [here](https://cash.me/%24thekasems) so that i can stay alive. (we're switching to the cash app. we're not using the other apps anymore.)


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